American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (55 page)

“Matt, was that your stepson”
:
Ibid., p. 149.

“It was supposed to be a quiet rally”
:
Time
, September 7, 1970.

one of the most distinguished
:
Ruben Salazar,
Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955–1970
, Mario T. Garcia, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

“the minds of barrio people”
:
Frank O. Sotomayor, “End the Never-Ending Mystery of Ruben Salazar’s Death,”
LAobserved.com
, August 27, 2010, http://www.laob served.com/visiting/2010/08/end_the_never-ending_mystery_o.php.

“Murdered in Vietnam”
:
The first sign appears in a ten-minute documentary at the 2-minute, 19-second mark, “Chicano Moratorium,” made by Tom Myrdahl, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=famNeiosTVk. The other signs are cited in George Mariscal, ed.,
Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 187.

“Two Chicanos died”
:
Lorena Oropeza,
Raza Si! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Viet Nam War Era
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 145–82; Matt Meyer, ed.,
Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners
(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008), pp. 22–23.

The projectile struck Salazar
:
Hector Tobar, “Finally, Transparency in the Ruben Salazar Case,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 5, 2011. One of the few contemporary journalistic efforts to explore the Salazar killing was Hunter Thompson’s “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,”
Rolling Stone
, April 18, 1971.

“To us, it was a political event”
:
Jeb Stuart Magruder,
An American Life
(New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 119.

“We hate writing for a repressive reactionary”
:
Anthony Lukas, “This Is Bob (Politician-Patriot-Publicist) Hope,”
New York Times
, October 4, 1970.

“If we ever let the Communists win”
:
Time
, November 21, 1969.

“Bullshit! Bullshit!”
:
Perlstein,
Nixonland
, p. 502.

Honor America Day
:
“Nation: Gathering in Praise of America,”
Time
, July 13, 1970.

“America—Love It or Leave It”
:
See, for example,
Time
, June 6, 1969, “Los Angeles: Bitter Victory”; Reeves,
President Nixon
, p. 226.

More than fifty thousand left
:
John Hagan,
Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

the
Bob Hope Christmas Special
:
This analysis draws largely on the nine-hour, 3-DVD collection,
Bob Hope: The Vietnam Years, 1964–1972
, designed and developed by Respond2 Entertainment.

“They didn’t laugh at anything”
:
Bob Hope,
The Last Christmas Show
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), p. 290.

V for victory
:
William R. Faith,
Bob Hope: A Life in Comedy
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982), p. 329.

marijuana jokes
:
Boston Globe
, December 23, 1970.

racial brawls
:
Westheider,
The African American Experience in Vietnam,
pp. 72–82.

“Phony ambushes”
:
Tim O’Brien,
If I Die in a Combat Zone
(New York: Delacorte, 1973), pp. 107, 131–32.

“combat refusals”
:
Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage,
Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), pp. 45–46.

“military disintegration”
:
Ibid.

47 percent admitted to acts of dissent
:
David Cortright,
Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), p. 270.

The World of Charlie Company
:
This documentary is included in volume 1 of a twelve-hour, 3-DVD collection called
The Vietnam War With Walter Cronkite
offered by Timeless Media Group.

wildly distorted myth
:
Jeremy Kuzmarov,
The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).

collective resistance among GIs
:
Cortright,
Soldiers in Revolt
, pp. 10–17.

“fragging”
:
Richard Moser,
The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), pp. 48–51; Appy,
Working-Class War
, pp. 246–47.

“a state approaching collapse”
:
Robert Heinl, “Collapse of the Armed Forces,”
Armed Forces Journal
, June 1971, p. 35.

“Suppose they gave a war and no one came”
:
The phrase is a slight rewording of a line from Carl Sandburg’s poem
The People, Yes
(1936), which portrayed a young girl responding to her first military parade with the line “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” The 1960s version of the line began to spread after the publication of an article by Charlotte Keyes about her son’s draft resistance. “Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came” (
McCall’s
, October 1966). The bumper sticker phrased it as a question: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”

they gathered in Detroit
:
See Vietnam Veterans Against the War,
The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). On the VVAW and its medal turn-in demonstration, see Gerald Nicosia,
Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement
(New York: Crown, 2001), pp. 133–144.

“we
are
the troops”
:
Ibid., pp. 110–111.

Operation RAW
:
Ibid., pp. 59–61.

“You men are a disgrace”
:
Wilbur J. Scott,
Vietnam Veterans Since the War: The Politics of PTSD, Agent Orange, and the National Memorial
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 14.

unique in world history
:
For a classic example of Commager’s view of American exceptionalism, see Henry Steele Commager, “Do We Have a Class Society?”
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Autumn 1961. This article has been reprinted in Alexander Burnham,
We Write for Our Own Time
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2000); on Commager more generally, see Neil Jumonville,
Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

“it is a war we must lose”
:
Henry Steele Commager,
The Defeat of America: Presidential Power and the National Character
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), p. 104. The title article originally appeared in the
New York Review of Books
, October 5, 1972.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT
: V
ICTI
M
N
ATION

covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
:
Edwin A. Martini,
Invisible War: The American War on Vietnam, 1975–2000
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), p. 13. On the decline of media coverage, see William Hammond, “Who Were the Saigon Correspondents and Does It Matter?” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Working Paper Series, Spring 1999, http://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/2000_08_hammond.pdf.

The failure of the Accords
:
See Larry Berman,
No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam
(New York: Free Press, 2001).

another major story to cover
:
Michael Schudson,
Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past
(NY: Basic Books, 1993).

This was no longer a stalemate
:
Schell,
The Real War
, pp. 48–55; Arnold Isaacs,
Without Honor
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

Ford went to Tulane
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4859&st=&st1=. Hagopian,
The Vietnam War in American Memory
, pp. 32–33.

Nguyen Van Thieu gave an emotional
 . . . address:
Samuel Lipsman, Stephen Weiss, Clark Dougan, and David Fulghum,
The Fall of the South, Vol. 18
(Boston: Boston Publishing Company, 1986), p. 139.

Snepp whisked Thieu to the airport
:
Appy,
Patriots
, pp. 500–501.

“exhausted and dispirited”
:
Time
, April 28, 1975.

“fated for tragedy”
:
Ibid
.

“Let’s look ferocious!”
:
Ron Nessen,
It Sure Looks Different from the Inside
(New York: Playboy Press, 1978), p. 129.

“it puts the epaulets back on”
:
Newsweek
, May 26, 1975, p. 15; poll cited in Emerson,
Winners and Losers
, p. 32.

no longer in danger
:
Ralph Wetterhahn,
The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War
(Boston: Da Capo, 2001), pp. 189–90.

the United States had blasted Cambodia
:
William Shawcross,
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979); Elizabeth Becker,
When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution
(New York: Public Affairs, 1998), p. 17, on food shortages.

unprovoked attack followed by glorious victory
:
Engelhardt,
The End of Victory Culture
.

58 percent
:
Herring,
America’s Longest War
, p. 300.

“the destruction was mutual”
:
Martini,
Invisible Enemies
, p. 45.

in his inaugural address
:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=6575.

suffering a “crisis of confidence”
:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/.

“Death to America!”
:
David Farber,
Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 103.

“den of spies”
:
Ibid., p. 141.

America Held Hostage
:
Ibid., pp. 137–39.

CIA . . . plan to . . . overthrow Mossadegh:
Stephen Kinzer,
All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).

“blowback”
:
Chalmers Johnson,
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).

extended national family
:
Melani McAlister,
Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 207.

“The Year of the Hostage”
:
Steven V. Roberts, “The Year of the Hostage,”
New York Times Magazine
, November 2, 1980; cited and analyzed in Michael J. Allen,
Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs, and the Unending Vietnam War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 202.

the
Pueblo
 . . .
was seized:
Mitchell B. Lerner,
The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

“Rose Garden strategy”
:
Godfrey Sperling Jr., “‘Hostage’ in Rose Garden? Carter Rethinking Strategy,”
Christian Science Monitor
, April 28, 1980.

“Debacle in the Desert”
:
Time
, May 5, 1980.

“We’re paying you back for Vietnam”
:
New York Times
, January 27, 1981.

yellow ribbons
:
Gerald E. Parsons, “How the Yellow Ribbon Became a National Folk Symbol,”
Folklife Center News
, vol. 13, no. 3, Summer 1991, http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html; McAlister,
Epic Encounters
, pp. 198, 344.

“patriotic bath”
:
Time
, February 23, 1981.

“so in need of self-esteem”
:
Ibid.